An Innocent Deception
by PursuitsEternal
Summary: <html><head></head>Paris in the throws of Carnival is a sinister place. When Eponine must bring in money through... more soliciting means, Marius attempts to solve her problems.  However, it may leave only one solution to the wretch's plight.</html>
1. Broken Chairs and Broken Backs

**Author's Note: just a short idea I've had for a story. It occurs in neither in complete musical verse nor book verse, but some amalgamation of the two. **

**Thus, I leave you in a dark room of the Gorbeau tenements, as infamous as they are...**

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><p>His fingers massaged over his brow. His eager blue eyes strained to read the tome that rested open-leafed on his desk. The candle at his elbow sputtered and smoked, so close to gutting out and letting the early-morning darkness fill the small bedroom.<p>

Marius sighed, stretching his arms high above his head and reclining against the ribbed back of his old chair. To be so young and plagued by cares wearied him. Long hours over books and no money for coal or wood to light up the heating stove made for long, cold and sleepless nights. His breath fogged from his mouth, the plume barely visible in February's freezing night. Marius shrugged his complaints away, trying to smile as he stretched his back out against the chair, hoping to crack his stiffened spine. Things could always be worse, he reassured himself with a feeble laugh to himself.

Suddenly something beneath him cracked loudly, and it was most certainly not his back. Before he knew it, Marius lay sprawled across the mercilessly hard wooden floor, his legs still hanging on the seat of his chair, the remnants of his chair's back poked and gouged into his spine. Tumbled, draped, and frankly embarrassed, Marius brushed himself off, pulling a thin wooden rod from under his hip. Heaving himself up with a chuckle and an ironic shake of his head, he shoved the stick into the stove and began to shovel the matching remnants to join their mate.

Things could always be worse. At least now he had firewood.

Soon, the small tenement room crackled and sparked with heat. Crouching by the thawing heat and smoking stove, Marius propped the law book between his knees, squinting by the dim firelight at the faint and yellowed pages. The pop and hiss of fire lulled him, creating a fuzzy silence, a dulling quietness that enveloped him. Numb to everything around him, Marius hardly noticed the fifty pages of his law book pass before his attention; that is until the law book's pages became a pillow for his studiously creased forehead.

But before he could so much as take a few minutes of cozy respite, Marius jumped at the loud thuds and bangs that suddenly sounded through his tiny room. The booming voice of his neighbor echoed straight through the adjoining wall, physically reverberating through the thin floorboards under him.

Again, this was merely part and parcel to his current, pitiful existence. "Shut up, Jondrette," Marius grumbled into his open law book. With a groan, he stoked the fire, breaking the former leg of his chair across his knee to feed the flames.

The man's growl rose to a scream, terrifying and earthshaking. "What do you mean that you won' do it?"

A pause of several seconds seemed to hang in the air before Jondrette's berating continued. The silence of a timid reply too thin to pass through paper-thin walls.

The roar had grown even louder, if that were possible. "No, my girl. I'll have none o' this from you. It's Carnival. There are loads of fat money purses and that many more prying eyes of the police all around. Those dogs have their wind up. Pickin' pockets just won' work. If you don' bring in fifty francs by Wednesday, then I'll flay that filthy back o' yours, you hear me?"

Something thudded loudly against the joining wall, and Marius was half-sure that the wall would give way to whatever caused such a resounding crash. Bare feet bolted across their floor, stopping for but a second to fling open their door before racing down the hall and down the stairs.

As the steps pounded past his door, Marius heard a familiar voice sobbing and moaning, its throaty and scratched resonance unmistakable.

"Eponine," Marius realized to the silence of his room, quickly heaving himself from the floor and hurriedly grabbing his coat and hat. Little good they would do against the winter winds. He flung open his own door, not even pausing to lock the latch behind him. Such is the benefit of owning no belongings, after all. Careful not to trip down the rickety and weak wooden stairs, Marius knew trouble was rearing its ugly head for the poor girl. And for all the times she had tried to comfort him, he would do the same.

Reaching the front door, he stumbled out of the tenements and into the empty street. In the faintly seeping light of dawn, he barely caught sight of her sullied slip darting around the corner. Under his breath, Marius threw a silent curse at the corner window of the tenement behind his back. This was neither the first, nor the last time Jondrette threw his own daughter into the clutches of crime. As a law student, it vaguely irked him, as a humanitarian, it caused his beating heart to bleed for her with pity. Such a family as the Jondrettes rarely sprung from healthy soil. Marius knew little enough about botany so as not to mistake if for law, but he knew enough to recognize when a rose is choked out by its own thorns.


	2. Winter Wind and Crying

**To all my reviewers, _grand merci._**

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><p>Racing down the rue, Marius fairly skated over patches of hidden ice behind Eponine, following the unmistakable print of bare feet in the February snow. Her feeble tracks ran down the walk, disappearing into an entryway. It was shadowed and abandoned, but a place of limited respite from the wind that already numbed Marius's extremities. He could only imagine the poor girl's chill.<p>

As he trudged towards the doorway's recess, he shouted her name into the icy air, the night breeze quickly dispersing the heat of his breath over Paris. Marius drew to a halt at the end of her tracks, peering into the darkness of the doorway. He could see nothing but blackness. Taking a deep breath, he tried to catch his wind, the freezing air burning his spent lungs. He coughed and huffed and turned to leave, unsure where to look for her next.

"Monsieur Marius?" the darkness asked tentatively. From the furthest shadows, the young girl emerged.

Startled, Marius almost asked her how she could do such a trick, but then he remembered her trade. It was as necessary for her to disappear in the streets as it was for her to breath. He swallowed and tried to catch his breath for the second time, his breathing too rapid to even manage a word. But he managed a nod and a smile as she shied forward.

The dark brown of her eyes barely lit in the shadows, but he could see their frightened warmth all the same. It was the way they stood out from the thin and pale frame of her cheeks. Eyes just like a doe's as it first spies its hunter—round, full and perpetually terrified. "You followed me, Monsieur Marius? " her throaty voice demanded softly, barely able to hide the quaver that still lingered from her tears. "Why?"

Marius shivered and retreated into the entryway, grateful for the lack of wind if not the lack of chill. "Eponine, you are freezing," he shook his head as he watched her subtly dance from frozen foot to frozen foot. "Sit down and wrap yourself in this." Taking his thick woolen greatcoat from his back, he proffered it towards her as she sank to the ground against the wall. Draping it over her miserable form, Marius could not help but grieve the minimal warmth he had sacrificed.

Eponine's big, dark eyes studied him from the cold ground. Curling herself as tightly as she could, she turned his coat lengthwise, offering the corner to share its warmth.

"_Merci_," Marius muttered half unwillingly, eager for the warmth but shy to sit so near the girl. He realized as he reentered the woolen, makeshift blanket that he had never been this close to her before. Her wide eyes smiled brightly, losing their fear for a single moment. That's when he had a second realization, so soon after his first. She had beautiful lashes.

Those thick lashes beat rapidly to drive the last drips of tears from the borders of her eyes. "I am glad you are here, Monsieur Marius, but why did you follow me?" she repeated so softly and so closely.

Marius smiled between shivers. "I heard you bolt from your rooms and from your father. I wanted to try and help you, if I could."

"That is sweet of you," Eponine's pale and frozen lips forced an awkwardly saccharine smile that appeared extremely _outré_ for her weathered face. "But I doubt that you can, Monsieur Marius. How much did you hear?"

Shrugging his shoulders, Marius played innocent. "Something about Carnival and purses and fifty francs by Wednesday..."

From beneath the coat, he felt her shiver, and Marius suspected it wasn't caused merely by the cold. A suppressed sob confirmed suspicion. She buried her face in the trembling palms of her hands, and Marius' heart warmed with pity. He reached out his arm around the shaking girl, bringing her against his own shivering chest. Her tears, he could feel, had already begun to freeze on her cheeks and in the dark strands of her hair.

He shushed her calmly, feeling her jerking and chattering slow its pace. "Monsieur Marius, even you can't save me from Papa this time," she said, following her pitiful announcement with another sigh, one filled with a strange form of peaceful suffering. "I wish I could stay just like this, Monsieur."

Marius thought he should pull himself back a bit, show some propriety and not go cuddling with urchin girls in shadowed doorways in the middle of a February night. But he could simply not bring himself to do so. Propriety be damned, this was much warmer at any rate anyway. Warm and peaceful.

"Tell me, Eponine," Marius returned to the issue at hand, "What exactly is your Papa forcing you to do?"

Another suffering shiver passed through her bony frame. "To sell myself, Monsieur."

Marius clumsily cleared his throat at the perfunctory tone in her voice. It was as though she stated that two and two make four, or that the Earth orbited the Sun. It was a statement of fact.

Suddenly she jolted up excitedly, a shine returning to her wide eyes. "Perhaps you have fifty francs, Monsieur Marius?"

"Uh," Marius smiled weakly, shaking his head, "unfortunately no."

"Oh," she grunted, and the fragment of hope died in her eyes. "Then perhaps you could..." Her words died on her lips, but her hands continued to travel towards the soft lines of his jaw, barely ghosting on his skin with their cold touch.

Marius gently caught her hand in his, placing it back down between them with all the pity that piqued his heart. "No, Eponine, I have no money at all."

Her eyes darted away. "Ah well, then. I will probably die. Some drunk foreigner will probably kill me, or mutilate me, or beat me. All just to bring another sous for my goddamn Papa."

"Eponine," Marius chastised her swearing.

She looked back at him with childish shame. "Sorry," she shrugged, "I mean my stupid Papa." The shadow of a smile passed between them, then vanished.

Marius's mind calculated and turned itself over to solve her dilemma. "You know, Eponine, I could ask my friends..."

"Would they be gentle?" her timid voice asked.

Marius paused. "I meant for money for you..."

She turned away, but not before he clearly saw bright red blush paint her cheekbone. She spoke, but did not turn her head. "That is kind of you, Monsieur. But if they are not willing to part with money for charity, I am willing to earn it."

Marius sniffed at the perversion of her poveritized logic—that selling herself becomes honest work. "Do not worry, Eponine. I'll help you as much as I can. You can tell your father a friend is looking for rich clients for you, if you must. One way or another, you will have fifty francs."

Her skeletally thin arms embraced him in a surprisingly strong hug. "Oh, _merci_ Monsieur Marius!" she repeated over and over again. Then, she planted a trembling kiss on his cheek. Immediately, she pulled away, a look of utter surprise on her face, shocked at herself. Standing up, she stepped out from under the coat, leaving the warmth they had somehow found in the winter winds.

Marius followed suit, replacing the coat on his own back. "Now, let's go home. Even the draft of the tenements is preferable to the unprotected wilds of Paris' streets."

Eponine smiled widely, revealing her surprisingly beautiful teeth before she darted back into the street. With a deep breath, Marius braced himself to return on his trudge back through the cold, dreading the stark chill that waited for him.

He stopped mid step. 'Dammit,' he cursed, 'I left the stove on to warm an empty room.'


End file.
